On a recent episode of Checked In with Splash, two of Splash’s fearless leaders, Camille White-Stern and Zach Napolitano teamed up to talk about frightening experiences people have had in event marketing. Most importantly, Camille and Zach had some great advice on learning from these stories and rolling with the many, inevitable punches that come along with being an event marketer.
We won’t spoil all the stories, but we’ll hit the top four spookiest scenarios for you…
by Nadine Luchero
“When I worked at Cisco years ago, my industry speakers had a challenge joining a partner-facing webinar. I had to ad-lib to fill in until they could join 20 minutes later. Luckily I had previously loaded the slideware and held a dry run. There were over 200 attendees - scary!”
Yeesh! Saved by the ad-lib. Bravo, Nadine. As Zach so rightfully said, “We talk about the agile event marketer quite a bit, and usually, we're referring to people who use data to tweak their emailing strategy. This is taking agile event marketing to another level!”
by Ian Howard
“During a virtual event while in lockdown, we had a speaker presenting in our webinar platform. Once they'd finished their presentation, all the person had to do was close down the browser window. But instead of this, they decided to press the STOP button, thinking that was how they were supposed to exit. [The system] even warns you after clicking that button and says, “Do you really want to stop the live session?” Seconds later, the whole summit ended…”
Poor Ian’s team couldn’t even communicate with the summit attendees in real-time, since the speaker had shut down the entire session. Argh… what a fright!
by Sarah Foreman
“What really got me ‘shaking my boots’ as an event manager a few years ago was an onsite addition of 4 extra tables worth of people for a plated meal that was already set for over 3,000 …With only a few moments to spare before the program started, I remember having to walk (/run!) into the kitchen mid-plate to deliver the news to the chef. Talk about terrifying!”
Most people with events experience have had some kind of food-related horror story to add to their career autobiography. It sounds like Sarah deftly got herself out of this one and lived to tell the tale!
by Raluca Apostol
“At my first event ever, I was helping out the ops team and went to pick up the tickets from the printing house on the day of the event. I got there at 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday and was told they hadn't printed the ticket number on both sides. We needed to have one ticket go to the attendee and one to stay with us - it was a legal requirement… I asked the printing house if they can print at least 1,000 tickets and have them brought to me by 9 am when the event opens and they did. They then brought the remaining 9,000 tickets we needed to be printed on the day so we didn't have issues with any attendees not being able to get their tickets.”
Took me a minute to catch my breath after that start to the story where Raluca said this was her “first event ever”! Thankfully, Raluca concluded her story by saying, “And that's how I learned I’m actually okay in times of crisis!” You certainly are, girl. You certainly are.
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Well, we didn’t want to totally scare you out of your wits, so we’ll pause on the stories for now.
As we pivot from the season of skeletons and fright to the season of turkeys and thankfulness, Camille and Zach offered some advice along with these stories that may help all of us as we try to weather the storms of events gone wrong.
If you’re curious to hear Zach and Camille’s horror stories, be sure to give the full podcast episode a listen.
Until then, the only thing you have to fear is….the repetitive holiday playlists at every retail store you enter until year’s end (mwa ha ha ha!)
